PART 1
MEDIA = EMBODIMENT
How do differing media encourageâ
or discourageâparticular senses of
bodies in the world and bodies in
relation to others?
How have changes in media, over
time, entwined with differing
possibilities for bodies and relations
with others?
How can we work with available media
and media technologies to open new
possibilities for embodiment?
| |
1 | DRAWN TOGETHER Possibilities for Bodies in Words and Pictures |
| Anne Frances Wysocki |
A few years back, in an interview published in JAC, Stuart Hall suggested one reason production has always mattered to writing studies: Hall ties production to identity. He says that âthere is no final, finished identity position or selfâ to be reflected in oneâs writing; instead, as he describes the process of producing a written text, he says that
For Hall, that is, âWe therefore occupy our identities very retrospectively: having produced them, we then know who we areâ (qtd. in Drew 173). It is not that we find our selves in our work because there was a unified self that preceded the work and that only needed being made present somehow in the work; it is rather that what the work isâits status as a shaped object in front of usâmakes visible to us âwhat we are.â âI think only then,â continues Hall, âdo we make an investment [in the produced position], saying, âYes, I like that position, I am that sort of person, Iâm willing to occupy that positionâ (qtd. in Drew 173). One could also just as easily say, âNo, I do not like that position ⊠how can I rework it?ââbut in either case the position has had to be constructedâproducedâbefore it can be so judged.
That is, we see ourselves in what we produce. We can look at what we produce to ask, âIs that who I (at least in part) am? Is that who I want to be? Is that a position through which I want to be seen?â
In this chapter, I want to consider (altogether too quickly to be anything more than suggestive, given the space here) what kinds of identities and bodies can be constructed when one can use not only words but also picturesâas in comic books and graphic novelsâin composing.
In composing the selves-to-be-considered that Hall describes, we can only work with available cultural categories for shaping texts if we wish to be understood by others, as the New London Group describes when they argue that any composition must begin in âavailable designsâ (the existing social systems of conventions, grammars, and genres upon which all text composers rely) or as Kaja Silverman describes when she writes, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic structures, that âall subjects, male or female, rely for their identity upon the repertoire of culturally available imagesâ surrounding them at any time (295). The argument I build here about words and pictures as available designs or culturally available images depends on understanding words and pictures not as having essential, formal functions but as having histories. And because of the particular histories words and pictures have had relative to each other, and because of how then comics and graphic novels have come to have a particular cultural place at this moment, certain kinds of visible identitiesâand questionings of identities, and understandings of bodiesâare possible, for now.
The available designs of words and pictures, that is, come with attached discourses. How one articulates words and pictures, then, can play withâor againstâthose discourses.
In The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, Marshall McLuhan argues that the serious and repeated look of printed book pages homogenize (some) people. In the book there are men who build nations together because they see similarities in themselves as they learned to see book pages; in the book there is abstraction, but nothing of bodies; there is science and philosophy, but nothing of the quotidian; there are men and words, and men and words only. It is in McLuhanâs earlier The Mechanical Bride, first published in 1951, that there appear women, children, class distinctions, cars, nylons, Mennen Skin Bracer, pictures, advertising, and âsex, gunplay, fast actionâ (14); in this second book, McLuhan claims that
Whether or not one agrees with McLuhanâs claims (which align with the media theorists discussed in the introduction) that mass media encourage passive receptivity, McLuhan articulates words, when they are alone, to thought and men; pictures align with no thought and women.
These particular dichotomous articulations were not new with McLuhan, of course. The dichotomies were presaged even by the Pythagoreans and their list, quoted by Aristotle, of the ten pairs of opposites the Pythagoreans believed shaped all existenceâ
In Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, W.J.T. Mitchell discusses the shifting tensions among conceptions of word and image in the writings of G.E. Lessing, Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, Nelson Goodman, and Rudolf Arnheim. For one example, Mitchell offers a table that shows the âoppositions that regulate Lessingâs discourseâ (110):
Poetry | Painting |
Time | Space |
Arbitrary (man-made) signs | Natural Signs |
Infinite range | Narrow Sphere |
Expression | Imitation |
Mind | Body |
Internal | External |
Eloquent | Silent |
Sublimity | Beauty |
Ear | Eye |
Masculine | Feminine |
And Mitchell characterizes Lessingâs position toward these oppositions:
Or, as Mitchell writes in a later work, under such tradition the âimage is the medium of the subhuman, the savage, the âdumbâ animal, the child, the woman, the massesâ (Picture Theory 24).
And here, finally for now, is not another list but a description of a solitary reader set off against a group of television watchers, as Robert Romanyshyn turns a psychologistâs perspective to how the word and picture opposition shows itself in our actions and attentions (while adding new terms to either side of the above dichotomizing lists). Romanyshynâs work, from 1992, echoes McLuhan:
My quick travel through Western takes on word and picture, male and female, mind and body, reason and emotion, is quick, but establishes, I hope, that conceptually, these terms have been treated as connected essentials with ethical weight: word and picture are not simply conceived as neutrally different available choices for communication; they are conceived as discrete and unitary kinds of objects that articulate to highly valued categories that have been and are used to define what and who we might be and do in our lives with others. The reach of the articulations encourage us to judge others in relation to how well those others fit to one side or the other of these lists. If one chooses only words for composing a self, then and for example, it is not that there is something inherent in words that makes one look smart or male; it is that a cultural history supports one in so believing, seeing, and making sense of oneâs body.
Comic strip panel from the chapter âLost and Foundâ in One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry, © 2002 Lynda Barry, published by Sasquatch Books and used courtesy of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents.
In response to his considerations of how others have conceived word and image, Mitchell argues that any tension or difference we see between words and images is a âstruggle that carries the fundamental contradictions of our culture into the heart of theoretical discourse itself. The point, then, is not to heal the split between words and images, but to see what interests and powers it servesâ (Iconology 44). Precisely because one of their defining characteristics is that they hold words and pictures together on a page (on this defining characteristic, see, for example, McCloud; Hatfield; Varnum and Gibbons), comics offer a site for exploring how the historical and particularly valued articulations of word and picture move beyond the conceptual and into questions of interests and powers. Several snapshots from the history of comics can show, then, how these media are not inherently less serious than print-only texts but how their mediating potentials can be shaped by political and social decisions.
âThe marijuana of the nursery, the bane of the bassinet, the horror of the house, the curse of the kids, and a threat to the futureâ is how John Mason Brown, a drama critic for The Saturday Review of Literature, described comics in a 1948 radio debate called âWhatâs Wrong with Comics?â The name of the debate (which was sponsored by the ABC radio show Americaâs Town Meetings of the Air) suggests that the direction of the debate was shaped beforehand: those speaking against comics could be on the attack from the start but those speaking in favor had to be on the defensive, needing to prove nothing was wrong with comics. In addition to calling them the âmarijuana of the nursery,â Brown also called comics âthe lowest, most despicable, and harmful form of trash,â because they made reading âtoo easyâ (Nyberg 44).
This debate was not an isolated event, but rather part of an on-going concern in the 1940s and 1950s in the USâand around the worldâover the effects comics were having on youth and, implicitly, on adult readers. (See both Lentâs âComic Debates,â and the edited collection for which that article served as an introduction, for a sense of just how international the debate over comics was in the 1940s and 1950s.) I want to consider such criticisms of comics against the backdrop of the word-picture articulations I outlined previously, to argue that when comics are criticized for not being serious enough, for not teaching serious reading and writing abilities, or for not teaching serious thinking, it is not because the pictures have somehow won out over the words; it is instead because their critics fear comics are too serious. Comics have come under attack, I argue, not because they necessarily cause people to think poorly or live as though they are bodies only but because their appeal to large audiences can potentially make them a threat to the existing social order if their content is not controlled. Because arguments to decide means of social control rarely claim social control as their explicit end, however, the arguments about comics instead get focused on their formal aspects, on their uses of words and pictures together: comics are argued to be demeaning and infantilizing and then are made to be so, their words and pictures simplified and reduced from what they could otherwise be.
A dip into the history of comics will thus help make clear how the potential mediations of comicsâof words and picturesâare not fixed.
Although some writers find the origins of comics in cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mayan illustrated books, or old European tapestries that show sequences of illustrations with words explaining what is in the illustrations (McCloud; Nielsen and Wichmann; Jerry Robinson), some pages that look like what we now call comics appeared in illustrated educational magazines of the first half of the nineteenth century. These magazines, such as Penny Magazine and Penny Cyclopedia produced by the Society for the Diffusion of Really Useful Knowledge, were published for the working classes. As Adrian Johns, a researcher into book history, argues, the society
Worried, that is, that working-class people who read the same books as the upper classes would get ideas about what their lives should be, the society provided to the lower classes magazines with simplified information (which relied more heavily on illustrations than on words) about (for example) natural history and mathematics; by 1832, the magazines had one million readers. As for the story magazinesâcalled âpenny dreadfulsâ because of, as Roger Sabin describes, âtheir lurid subject matterâ about wild boys, criminals, and murderersâthese too were âdesigned for a working class audienceâ and âwere read primarily by young menâ (Comics 14). Sabin writes that they were at one time in the nineteenth century
Similarly, Kress and van Leeuwen understand processes of culturalâclassâdifferentiation in the nineteenth century to have included differentiation between the value of word and picture; they connect this differentiation to the entrenchment of capital at a particular time and to the development of more visual texts explicitly for mass consumption:
Kress and van Leeuwen thus argue that pages attentive to layout and variety are aimed at ââthe masses,â or childrenâ (186), so that pages of words only can be used by othersâthe âruling class,â âthe middle classâ that is aspiring âupwardsââto show their particular...